Madam, - Noeleen Dowling (October 30th) describes Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer as "virtually unreadable" and asks "if anyone involved in compiling your list [of great Irish novels\] has actually read this Gothic, psychotic drivel?"
While I had nothing to do with compiling the list, and hence cannot claim the "special prize" recommended by Ms Dowling, I have read Melmoth several times with the greatest of pleasure. I have little doubt that anyone whose canons of "readability" derive from the monosyllabic linear realism that characterises the majority of books on the list would indeed find Maturin's influential classic unreadable, and I am delighted that Terry Eagleton chose it. In fact it is Melmoth the Wanderer that renders most subsequent Irish fiction both irrelevant and unreadable. - Yours, etc.,
RAYMOND DEANE, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.